The other day, the Carrie series on Amazon came out. The one written by Mike Flannigan. The one I didn't have any hope for from the start, for several reasons. Namely because I really, really do not like any of his other movies/series, even though they somehow keep getting recommended to me over and over. Mike doesn't do or know horror. He knows trauma porn, and he's not even that good at writing it anyway. The second reason I was not excited for this garbage was that, of all the things we do not need remade, again, it's Carrie. The original movie is fine and still holds up today. I do not see how adding smartphones and cyberbullying fixes it or makes it better. However, if that was all Mike chose to do, and kept it relatively close to canon otherwise, then it may have at least been entertaining. That isn't what he did. What follows is a whole review of why this series is trash and doesn't make any sense. It will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen it yet, then don't pay attention to this, but my advice is not to waste your time. I want my 8 hours of life back.
Yes, you read that correctly. In the book (and subsequent movie), Ralph White, as a living person, doesn't exist in the narrative at all. Not alive, that is. He isn't needed. In this version, they have him in the opening 3-4 minutes. He is listening to conspiracy theory radio talk as he drives to work, gets to work, and then immediately dies. Everyone at the construction site doesn't seem to even know who he is or was so there is a welfare check done on his house. This is where they find Margaret and Carrie in the prayer closet. This is only really set up for the narrative to say that the reason why Margaret is the way she is (abusive and religious) is that Ralph was abusive and religious (also paranoid); ergo, we can excuse whatever Margaret and Carrie end up doing because they are just victims. Whatever happened to women just being evil because of whatever; can we not do that anymore? No, of course it had to be a man at fault, and this is a narrative they keep pushing hard throughout the rest of the series for no reason whatsoever.
They establish from early on that Carrie tested "higher" than her age (or something) when they do testing for school because, for some reason, CPS comes in and demands that she go to public school. I don't know why, since homeschooling is legal, the house was clean and nice, and there were no outward signs of abuse; there were no signs that Carrie was starving or malnourished, etc. CPS ignores way worse cases than this, but I guess they needed to force a plot point to get Carrie into public school because otherwise she'd just have stayed at home with Margaret and there would be no story. I do not know why they did this because, once again, if you remove Ralph from this whole stupid plot, you don't need to add in an additional stupid plot to force the narrative to happen.
It's also established that Carrie is secretly getting books from her neighbor friend Stella and has been for years. They show that when Carrie was a little girl, she went into her neighbor's backyard and asked her what she was reading. Carrie seemed to think the only book in the world was the Bible, and Stella tells her no and starts leaving her books in secret in the bird feeder in their backyard. This establishes that Carrie has read a lot and the classics from a young age up until the day she started high school. Yet when she gets to high school, she has no idea what a metal detector is or what it's for. However, a school like this wouldn't even have a metal detector. This story takes place in a very small town in Maine, not a major city with a public school system that would even warrant security or a metal detector. This is only there to introduce her to Sue and Chris so they can see how "stupid" she is, though with all the books she's definitely read, she should have at least had a concept of this.
Even if I can agree that maybe, somehow, this never came up in any of the books she did read, something I can't believe is that she didn't know what the word drill meant. They have an active shooter drill in the middle of homeroom, and everyone's just doing it because it's normal for them, and she freaks out. They keep telling her it's just a drill. She doesn't know what that means. So she's read all of these books and tested higher than average for her age to get her into her sophomore year at that high school, but has no idea what the word drill means? Never heard of a fire drill? Military drill? That never came up in any books she read? She was holding the book Catcher In The Rye in one scene; I can't believe she couldn't understand what they were talking about. I also don't understand why one of the kids didn't just tell her, "That means this is fake it's not real," but even if someone eventually gets around to that, it's too late. Carrie will consistently somehow be really smart and really stupid for the sake of the plot through the rest of the series.
In the original book and movie, Chris is a normal, pretty realistic high school bully. Everything she does it what you'd expect of a normal, realistic high school bully. It doesn't strain credulity at all. This Chris, whatever they did to her, they made her like an actual fucking sociopath for no real reason? I mean, she's above and beyond cruel to Carrie. They try to kind of justify it because Chris has a bad home life (parents are getting a divorce and she can't afford to go to Duke with her friend for college), but that's kind of not really enough justification. You don't go from normal and kind of snobby (how she started) to an absolute psycho because of these things. We are talking about really dangerous stuff that could get people killed and eventually does get one person killed. They really didn't need to make her this over-the-top crazy. The normal beats that Chris goes through in the source material are bad enough. Why did they crank this up to 1000 and make her be this way? It doesn't even make sense.
In the original source material, Tommy shows interest in Carrie at least to the extent that he is nice to her, and he does it several times, and it's somewhat genuine even if prompted by Sue. It's at least genuine enough that it's believable, and even if it weren't, Carrie was super interested in him anyway. In this series, Carrie looks at Tommy like once in homeroom and seems to think he's cute/nice, but she's not super into him. They have very few interactions through the series. By the time he asks her to Prom, it's like, why the fuck? She barely has a crush on him anyway, and then she's also like barely even interested in prom, which makes no sense because that was like the whole thing Carrie in the original source material was interested in.
At some point, after the classic, well-known Carrie gets her period and thinks she's dying scene (even though, as I said, with all the books she was getting from her neighbor, you think she'd have read about this at least one time), Chris decides to make this bully account on Instagram called CarrieRed. This Instagram account is literally just the Burn Book from Mean Girls, but not as funny or creative. In fact, there's so much inappropriate content on there that IG itself would have removed it well before the point it got as "viral" as it did. However, even the fact that it got "viral" makes no sense. As I mentioned, this is a small town in Maine. Rural Maine. Maybe the 300 kids in the high school would care about it. Maybe some of their parents. There would not be thousands of followers for this account because it was lame and all of it was personal and stupid rumors about people at that school. No one from across the country would feel any need to follow this account to keep up with the gossip. Even if they did, the mass reporting and the obvious violation of the harassment rules that Instagram already has would have shut the account down internally. Chris wouldn't have been able to keep running it because Meta would have called it bullying and nuked it. Does Mike Flannigan even know what Instagram is or how it works?
In just a few episodes, Carrie goes from not knowing what's wrong with her to having full control over her powers. This is thanks to help from some "imaginary friend" named Emaline (I think that was her name?). Well, she wasn't imaginary; she was an astral projector, and only Carrie could see her. Which is also stupid, but I'll explain more about that later. Emaline keeps encouraging her to be a psychopath with her powers and use them for evil. She teaches Carrie how to control them and get better at using them. How to practice. Takes her to a junkyard to do it. Eventually, this leads to Carrie bullying Chris in the cafeteria by using her powers to break Chris' nose in front of everyone. With this fine-tuned skill that she already has, and way before prom, what exactly is the purpose? Why would she even care about prom at that point when she knows she has these powers and she can do stuff like that? This also makes her extremely abusive to her mother. Which, I don't really want to defend Margaret White and normally wouldn't, but in this series? Margaret White isn't even close to what Margaret White is supposed to be. Even if she were, the fact that Carrie is in the house bullying her mom for weeks just so she can "do whatever she wants" makes no sense. Once again, narratively, the whole reason the plot works in the original is that Carrie doesn't really accept or understand or control these powers until she's pushed to the very edge. This Carrie having them and having full control over them way before prom makes what sort of sense?
Is she still a religious zealot? Yes. She's also kind of a conspiracy theory nut job who thinks processed food and dyes will give you cancer or make you crazy or something. However, she's really no worse than your typical white woman who does this, and no one really pays attention to her. She does make Carrie go in the prayer closet sometimes, but she's not really vicious. She's kind of mad when she finds out that Carrie has been sneaking out of the house to do stuff, but the moment Carrie cries about everyone being mean to her, Margaret just takes her side and forgets that Carrie went against her rules. This character may have had the name of Margaret White, but she was the worst portrayal and written version of this character that has ever existed in the history of the fucking universe. They made her very soft, they made her pull back on her religious nonsense way too much, and they made her just like put up with Carrie bullying her instead of trying to give her an exorcism or something. She also starts to go out of character even for the bad character they established. A woman afraid of the government, cellphones, computers, Big Brother, being monitored? Well, as soon as she finds out about the CarrieRed account on Instagram, she gets on Instagram, she starts livestreaming, she becomes a social media star herself. Like what? I get that she wants to defend her daughter (I mean this version of the character), but there were other ways for her to do that outside of jumping right into the technology she clearly hated for like 40 years of life until Chris made that account.
In literally all versions of this story, the book, the original movie, and the bad remakes, Chris is already well established in a relationship with Billy when the story starts. In this one, for some reason, they make him a lot older: not in high school, a drug dealer who comes to high school parties to deal to kids, a loser, and a psychopath. Chris doesn't even really seem to know him when the show starts. They talk at a party, and she doesn't seem to like him, but then he does some psycho path boyfriend things, and she really likes him. Also, he conveniently lives on/owns a pig farm, really only for the setup that we need at the end to drop the blood on Carrie's head. I have absolutely no idea why they set it up this way or at one point (only one) made Chris seem randomly obnoxiously jealous of Sue's boyfriend, but they did, and that was a...choice? I guess. Not that these relationships needed to be like this at all. Why did Chris need to hate Billy? She was constantly acting like he was a loser (even calling him that) but still dating him? All because her parents were getting a divorce? Also, then there were the parents, and this is even more ridiculous than the whole Chris plotline.
I get that she's a Daddy's girl and he thinks she can't do anything wrong but literally at one point her mom basically says that she divorced Chris' father because he was a dick basically and Chris was becoming more and more like him. Her mom also very obviously thinks Chris is in the wrong for making the bully account, which leads to physical fights at school and at least one suicide. There is no "proof" that she's running the account initially (though it's really obvious it's her unless you only have one brain cell). So when Sue finds out it is her (which, once again, Sue should have already known since she's not an idiot) and she tells people, Chris gets called into the principal's office. Then her dad says it's not his daughter and starts threatening to sue everyone. Somehow this works, and Chris gets off the hook. She continues the account. That's when the suicide happens. Still, her dad keeps defending her and saying he'll sue everyone if they say it's her, especially Carrie's mom, who found out and is livestreaming everyone about it and is somehow "viral" even though none of this content would be anything anyone on the internet would care about.
After the suicide of the teacher (which, by the way, happens really fast and there's like no justification for it's literally only in there so they can show how horrible Chris is and has no real impact on the story, as it was a teacher and he wasn't in the show much anyway) nothing really happens to her? Like, she'd at least be charged with some kind of crime. The show says she's 18, and I'm pretty sure they'd want to write her up for whatever, but they don't. Then at some point, Sue begs Chris to think about her future and remove the account. Chris says she doesn't have to; it's called freedom of speech, and she'll basically run the account forever so suck it. Sue was secretly recording this confession, which she turns over to the principal. Chris is called in again with her father. The confession is played. It's obviously Chris. She just says that it's not her voice, and then her father claims that it was a spoofed voice using AI or something, and there's "no proof" it's his daughter. Which, for some reason, they don't bring up that Sue was the one who got the recording and witnessed Chris saying this and is a valid witness (I mean it's not like they'd have to protect her, Chris would know that's who turned her in at that point), but yeah, the principal doesn't say, "We have a witness to this confession so we know its her". The dad keeps threatening to sue everyone if the school expels Chris and doesn't let her graduate.
Somehow, instead of expelling her, which they should have done way before the point of confession, they decide to bring her in to have some kind of mediation with Carrie and Margaret. Now, keep in mind, until this point, the show has Chris' mom and her stepdad ANGRY AT HER for what she did and not on her side. Suddenly, during the mediation, they are on her side and saying that what she did isn't even that bad. They also try to argue that Chris wasn't really "running" the account because it was submissions other people from the school sent in, but like, what? Yes, maybe other people sent in submissions, but Chris was the one who chose to post them, and she was the one writing the captions. She could have just not done that. Yet the show tries to frame it as if it's everyone's fault, and Chris is somehow the victim more so than the bully. The school takes two sides on this because a lot of people want Chris to be expelled, and for some STUPID reason, a lot of people are on her side even though all it's done to the school and town is make everyone fight each other all the time. I really don't see how Chris has any support, least of all from her parents, who didn't support her until, like, basically the moment they found out she couldn't go to prom and graduate. She's told if she apologizes to Carrie, she can stay in school and go to prom, but she just says, "Fuck you freak," and then gets expelled anyway. This causes a riot at the school and a bunch of people get hurt. Also, the principal cancels prom, or wants to. I guess there's just a debate about that, which leads to a whole town meeting about if they should have prom or not.
As I mentioned before, Carrie didn't seem to know what prom was before the point that Tommy asked her to go with him. Not because Sue wanted a favor, but because Sue broke up with him for like no reason? I guess the reason was that she was going to Duke and just didn't want to be his girlfriend anymore? Like, really, they don't give a valid reason for this at all. Which leads to Tommy suddenly being super friendly with Carrie, even though he's barely interacted with her this entire show. She still, I guess, has a crush on him but when he says he might just give his prom tickets away or something she has like no idea what Prom is. First of all, no one in the school talked about it around her in a way she could figure out that it was a dance or a party for months? Sue didn't bring up going to Prom? Chris, who was pretending to be her friend, didn't mention going to prom? The weird girl who seemed to have a boner for being Chris' friend didn't mention Prom? I mean, that weird minion of Chris' even did a whole TikTok dance proposal to try to get Tommy to go to Prom with her, and even then Carrie barely seems interested in it. And then, once again, in literally none of the books she read over the years did anyone mention Prom? Wasn't it on social media? It seems really hard for me to believe she didn't know what Prom was. I guess I could believe she didn't care about it, but her asking Tommy what it was in the car was stupid and made no sense. Even then, she still says she doesn't really have an interest in going.
That is until the town meeting when they are debating if there should be Prom or not. She still doesn't really seem to care until her mom speaks up and gives a normal, non-crazy argument as to why they should not have prom. Like as in, I mean, if this was the real canon Margaret White she'd have said some crazy bullshit about Jesus and blasphemy and whatever else. This bizarre version is completely rational. So when she says that Carrie suddenly decides Prom is the most important thing ever and gives this super impassioned speech about it. Which convinces everyone they should totally have a prom. Okay, so now she cares because her mom doesn't care? Even though, as I said, her mom's argument against it wasn't even really a bad one. Considering the situation and volitility in the town I can actually see her point, which makes no sense, because Margaret White of all people should not make sense. She should be borderline insane. Whatever, obviously they needed to shoehorn in the Prom or else the most iconic scene couldn't happen. But wait, I haven't gotten to my biggest complaint about this stupid series yet.
At the start of almost every episode, there's some narration about how men are evil and all women who were ever special or powerful were oppressed/prosecuted all through time, and men are terrible and don't want women to have power. Every. Fucking. Episode. Which, okay, to some extent, I agreed with this, and I will say that women were more often persecuted for random shit in history than men. However, this whole premise doesn't work because plenty of men were treated this way as well. If they were mentally ill or if people just didn't like them. Plenty of men were accused of being witches or associated with the devil or evil. It happened to both men and women through the course of history. This is less about sexism and oppression and more about power and class. They didn't really need to make this argument over and over and over at the start of every single fucking episode, but I could ignore all of that if there weren't literally some fucking X-Men-type manor for all these girls with special powers. Which there is. I'm not joking.
Mid-series at some point, one of these X-Men (women?) people gets a psychic flash of Carrie's powers and "knows she's close"; they just don't know who/where she is. This girl runs to the headmistress of this academy to report this. Like, literally, this is just X-Men but only with women and way more stupid. This isn't even horror at this point; it's sci-fi and drama and written for idiots who can't handle horror. Also, what is even the point of this story if Carrie isn't the only one with powers? What is the point of this story if Carrie can use and control her powers really well before Prom? Why even go to Prom? Why not just escape and take over the world at that point? It's clear that she wants to do that, given how she's flaunting her powers and bullying her mother, so it seems like she'd just leave the city and not come back? Like, what the actual fuck? Then the classic ending is ruined because, as it turns out, Margaret has powers? See, when the house collapses cause of Carrie, she survives, somehow, then this Emaline person comes and "saves her" to drive her to this academy, I presume. They don't really say that in the show, but it's obvious. Then Margaret, as it turns out, kept the house from crushing her by using powers to levitate it off of her. Which they reveal at the very end but then immediately kill her because, well, it's not like it might have been interesting to see where that could have gone but no, give her something slightly cool that she can do and then kill her 3 minutes later because....plot?
I'm sure I have way more complaints about this show, but they would be in detail and super nitpicky and don't really matter compared to the main ones that I laid out here. This show isn't horror; it isn't even Carrie. Even the worst remake of Carrie that I've seen (which, ironically, is the one Bryan Fuller did in 2002) is still better than this. Even the 2014 pretty much shot-for-shot remake is better than this. It was unnecessary, sure, but it was still horror and still stuck with the concept of the original. The fuck was this show? At all? The only reason it exists as is, is because they knew if they made an original show like this with original characters, no one would watch it because it would be bad. So Mike Flannigan (once again) took an IP that used to be good, fucked it all up with his "elevated horror" nonsense, and somehow managed to make Carrie, with it not being Carrie or even a horror show. It's pretty much like a teen drama with more cussing. I would rather watch season 3 of Hannibal again, and I really hate season 3 of Hannibal, but at very least the characters are still the characters and don't suddenly at like fucking morons (other than Hannibal turning himself in because Will "broke up" with him). It's obvious from the ending of this series that it's already setting up for a second season, which I can't imagine will be any good. I'm not against female empowerment stories or media for young girls but if they have to do that can they not make it good? Not ruin an IP that was already good and didn't need to be transformed like this? What benefit is anyone getting from remaking this over and over and over for the "next generation". Carrie, the original, is fine as it is, and it needs to stay that way. Can we just let this remake concept die and allow the original iconic horror to stand alone for what it is?